Paloma McGregor will be performing an iteration of Building a Better Fishtrap at Loophole of Retreat: Venice, organized by Rashida Bumbray.

Organized by Rashida Bumbray, Director of Culture and Art at the Open Society Foundations, with curatorial advisors Saidiya Hartman, University Professor at Columbia University, and Tina Campt, Owen F. Walker Professor of Humanities and Modern Culture and Media, Brown University, the three-day symposium will comprise dialogue, performances, and presentations centered on Black women’s intellectual and creative labor.

Loophole of Retreat: Venice builds on an eponymous one-day convening held in 2019 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. The conceptual frame is drawn from the 1861 autobiography of Harriet Jacobs, a formerly enslaved woman who, for seven years after her escape, lived in a crawlspace she described as a “loophole of retreat.” Jacobs claimed this site as simultaneously an enclosure and a space for enacting practices of freedom—practices of thinking, planning, writing, and imagining new forms of freedom.

Learn more here.

The A’we deh ya film has been featured in the 2022 Denton Black Film Festival lineup!

Originally, DBFF was hosting a hybrid festival. We wanted to make sure your safety came first, so we moved virtual this year. Enjoy all of the film, music, comedy, spoken word, and tech experiences from the comfort of your home. Get access to the full virtual experience, or pick and choose your adventure as we continue to showcase Black Culture.

About Our Film

A’we deh ya (All of us are here)
Sketch 321 – Salt/Cane/Womb
In a Crucian sugar cane field, three Black women converge, dancing through an inherited liberation code.

Conceived & Directed by Paloma McGregor
Co-Created & Edited by Rosa Lisbeth Navarrete
Filmed by Paloma McGregor, MK Abadoo & Monica Marin
Choreographed & Performed by Paloma McGregor, MK Abadoo & Savannah Lyons Anthony
With Olamina McGregor Young-Spivey and Ella Abadoo

Poems by Jacinta V. White
Voice by Rosa Lisbeth Navarrete 

Produced by Angela’s Pulse
Filmed in Ay Ay (colonially known as St. Croix, US Virgin Islands)

Special Thanks to

Open Society Foundation’s Soros Arts Fellowship
The National Centre for Choreography (NCCAkron)
and curator Cara Hagan, for your invitation, vision and faith

The call and response of A’we deh ya (“All of us are here”) continues this year through a monthly virtual Study Group and creative process sessions with a dozen collaborators, June – October.

Together, we’ve discussed the impacts of industry on St. Croix and the Bronx River, hosted guest culture bearers and activists and envisioned ways to animate our undertold liberation technologies. Building upon our creative process from November 2020, our Study Group structure is a prototype for the next three years of the project’s development.

To culminate this year’s process, we are creating series of short dance films, which will be used to develop installation-based performance and a digital curriculum.

We will share some of these films in a private showing to select guests in December, with support from Soros Arts Fellowship, Movement Research and the Movement Lab at Barnard College.

Stay tuned for glimpses into the process!

The National Center for Choreography at the University of Akron (NCCAkron) presents a collection of short dance films by Cara Hagan and her collaborators – Ananya Chatterjea, Paloma McGregor and Tamara (Fákẹ́mi) Williams. Paloma shares a new film made in St. Croix in collaboration with MK Abadoo and Savannah Lyons Anthony, with editing by Rosa Navarrete.

On NCCAkron’s YouTube channel | Free

The broadcast features performances, artist talks, rituals, music, and meditations to explore and celebrate blackness and water as healing and liberation technologies.

black/water was commissioned by Betty’s Daughter Arts Collaborative’s Jupiter Performance Studio and curated by Ebony Noelle Golden.

The broadcast will be presented via bettysdaughterarts.com and will be accessible on our Facebook page, as well.

black/water Program guide

Get a peek into the research and development of A’we deh ya (“All of us are here”), a new work by Paloma McGregor, artistic director of Movement Lab’s Company-in-Residence Angela’s Pulse. A’we is a multi-disciplinary call-and-response between colony and mainland, being created in alignment with local efforts to thwart disaster capitalism in the wake of the destruction caused during the 2017 hurricane season.

More about MeMoSa: https://movement.barnard.edu/memosa

Featuring Works by: Angela’s Pulse Collaborator MK Abadoo, DWB Community Member jumatatu m poe, randy edward reyes, Bill Shannon, Amy Smith, Dom-Sebastian Alexis, Millicent Marie Johnnie AND an excerpt of Paloma McGregor’s Building a Better Fishtrap / from the river’s mouth

In (un)doing and (re)making, CU faculty and students join a radical re-imagining necessitated by the strain of the global pandemic. Inspired by the international conversation currently unfolding about inequity in dance, this year’s [un]WRAP investigates the ways the form is both surviving and striving to (re)assemble itself.

Featuring symposiums with the subject’s thought leaders and a streamed, virtual performance by artists who are inventing ways forward, audiences are invited to lean in, engage, and lay the foundation for what’s to come.

As artist in residence at The Movement Lab at Barnard College, Angela’s Pulse offers a workshop on the Fishtrap Method.

Paloma McGregor, co-founder and artistic director of Angela’s Pulse, leads us in an interactive workshop rooted in story-telling and building community. Come prepared to write, move, remember, listen and feel. The Fishtrap Method is a collaborative creative process developed by McGregor as part of her decade-long exploration of her father’s vanishing fishing tradition and three driving questions that emerged after she left her ancestral home, St. Croix: What do we take with us? Leave behind? Return to Reclaim?

Day 3 – May 28, 2020 from 11:00am-12:30pm PST

Intersecting Art, Activism, and Intentional Disruption of Colonial Spaces with Dance

Featuring:

Miriam Colvin, AD Myriad Dance Projects – Multiple Site Specific Dance Projects http://www.myriadprojects.ca/about

Robin Poitras – Choreographer, AD New Dance Horizons – Silks https://www.newdancehorizons.ca/silks.html

Susanne Chui – Choreographer, Mocean Dance – Burnwater https://moceandance.com/repertoire/burnwater-alchemy

Paloma McGregor with Nina A. Mercer – Building a Better Fishtrap http://angelaspulse.org/project/building-a-better-fishtrap/

Moderated Q&A to follow

The Fishtrap Method is an adaptive methodology for building performance work and building
community, developed by choreographer Paloma McGregor. Over the past eight years,
McGregor has been honing myriad processes – including writing, moving, storytelling, map
making and breaking bread – in order to elicit personal voice and develop connective
tissues between people, places and practices.

The first annual MOJUBA! Black Dance Fest is March 26 – 29, 2020 in Cleveland, OH.

More info & registration at www.MOJUBADANCE.org

Since 2010, 111 artists have had studios at Wave Hill through the Winter Workspace residency program. This time of experimentation and reflection in the garden proved immensely influential to their practices, launching new and expanded directions. The work they created has often been exhibited widely, finding new audiences, meanings and contexts. To celebrate the program’s 10th anniversary, a selection of those works made during residency returns to Wave Hill House, where visitors can see the garden in winter through the eyes of this stellar group of alumni artists.

A video excerpt of Building a Better Fishtrap / from the river’s mouth (June 24, 2018) has been selected to be on view during the exhibition from January 19 to March 29th, 2020. 

September 2019 continues the development of a new multi-year, multi-site performance project during a creative residency at Virginia Commonwealth University, made possible by the VCUarts Department of Dance and Choreography and Paloma McGregor’s Fellowship with the Urban Bush Women Choreographic Center Institute. The larger project, a culmination of Building a Better Fishtrap, aims to center locally-driven stories and visions for “abandoned” spaces across McGregor’s home island of St. Croix through embodied research and performance. Collaborators will start with the plot of land where my 93-year-old father grew up, in what one neighbor recently called “the forgotten corner of Christiansted.”

August 2019 begins the development of a new multi-year, multi-site performance project during a creative residency at Virginia Commonwealth University, made possible by the VCUarts Department of Dance and Choreography and Paloma McGregor’s Fellowship with the Urban Bush Women Choreographic Center Institute. The larger project, a culmination of Building a Better Fishtrap, aims to center locally-driven stories and visions for “abandoned” spaces across McGregor’s home island of St. Croix through embodied research and performance. Collaborators will start with the plot of land where my 93-year-old father grew up, in what one neighbor recently called “the forgotten corner of Christiansted.”

This residency includes an in process showing on Thursday, August 29, 2019 at 12:00 PM, free and open to the public.

June 23rd at 11:30PM and 3:30PM

Building a Better Fishtrap / from the river’s mouth is a performance ritual that honors and embodies the stories and spirit of the Bronx River. Created through collaboration with dozens of artists and community members, the work takes audiences by boat on a 1.5-mile stretch of the once embattled waterway; along the way, passengers encounter kaleidoscopic installations that draw from the river’s rich past and present, as well as hopes for her future. The boats will be piloted by docents from Bronx-based partner organizations.

This is the third major installment of choreographer Paloma McGregor’s iterative Fishtrap project; rooted in the reclamation of her 92-year-old father’s vanishing fishing tradition, the work centers on three central questions that arise when you leave your ancestral home: What do you take with you? Leave behind? Return to reclaim? “The doing in this work is its magic,” reflected Ni’Ja Whitson in InfiniteBody. “And McGregor does both the subtle and grand with such intention, the magic hypnotizes.”

Tickets on Sale Now!
Reserve your spot on the River HERE.

Locations & Route:

Two simultaneous performances will be activated along the Bronx River. Audiences can board boats at Starlight Park or Hunts Point Riverside Park, then will ride to Concrete Plant Park and return to their respective starting locations. Audiences will spend 2 hours on the boat routes.

Starlight Park
1490 Sheridan Expy, Bronx, NY 10459

Hunts Point Riverside Park
1409 Lafayette Ave, Bronx, NY 10474

Accessibility:

This performance is for all ages provided that adults accompany children and all participants follow safety rules and protocols. Accessibility on boats is limited, please inquire for more information.

Building a Better Fishtrap will join the Bronx River Alliance for the Celebration of River House, “the greenest building in the South Bronx.” Come celebrate with us as we share a site-responsive work created for the occasion.

Learn more about Building A Better Fishtrap HERE. 

Paloma McGregor’s iterative performance project, Building a Better Fishtrap, is rooted in the reclamation of her 91-year-old father’s vanishing fishing tradition. The work centers on three central questions that arise when you leave your ancestral home: What do you take with you? Leave behind? Return to reclaim?

In Phase 2, a solo work commissioned by Brooklyn Arts Exchange in 2016, McGregor enacts a ritual of remembering, both kaleidoscopic and intimate, through three distinct worlds. The work “commands its audience receive and witness with the same stamina the soloist McGregor rigorously expels,” reflected Ni’Ja Whitson on InfiniteBody. “The doing in this work is its magic. And McGregor does both the subtle and grand with such intention, the magic hypnotizes.”

During her 2016-18 Live Feed residency at New York Live Arts, McGregor is creating the third major installment of the Fishtrap project, an ensemble work that will premiere on the Bronx River in July 2018, supported by MAP Fund.

26 Days of Art + Theater featuring a Building A Better Fishtrap Installation

Works on Water is a month-long, multi-disciplinary triennial that presents multiple artistic and theatrical perspectives on water in a global context. The Works on Water exhibition is anchored by artists who make work with water as site or material. Additional artists include Torkwase Dyson, Floating Studios for Dark Ecologies (Marina Zurkow, with Nicholas Hubbard and Rebecca Lieberman), Marie Lorenz, Mare Liberium, Mary Mattingly, Eve Mosher, Nancy Nowacek, Sarah Cameron Sunde and TRYST (Clarinda Mac Low, Carolyn Hall and Paul Benney), many of whom are defining the field through longtime commitments to New York City waterways and urban ecology.

Artists who work with water are responding to the urgency of a changing climate, increasing urban density and a burgeoning public awareness of ecological concerns. Their works, made in, on or in direct response to the water connect to current economic, political and global issues, and reference Land Art, Public Art, and Performance Art. The cross-disciplinary nature of this event is intended to spark dialogue about the various approaches of visual and performing arts, environmental and social sciences and urban planning to engaging with the water on an individual, community, and global scale.

The exhibition is produced by Emily Blumenfeld, and the exhibition space is design by Louisa Thompson.

 Learn more about Building A Better Fishtrap HERE. 

Paloma McGregor’s iterative performance project, Building a Better Fishtrap, is rooted the reclamation of her 91-year-old father’s vanishing fishing tradition. The work centers on three central questions that arise when you leave your ancestral home: What do you take with you? Leave behind? Return to reclaim?

In Phase 2, a solo work commissioned by Brooklyn Arts Exchange in 2016, McGregor enacts a ritual of remembering, both kaleidoscopic and intimate, through three distinct worlds. The work “commands its audience receive and witness with the same stamina the soloist McGregor rigorously expels,” reflected Ni’Ja Whitson in InfiniteBody. “The doing in this work is its magic. And McGregor does both the subtle and grand with such intention, the magic hypnotizes.”

During her 2016-18 Live Feed residency at NYLA, McGregor is creating the third major installment of the Fishtrap project, an ensemble work that will premiere on the Bronx River in July 2018, supported by MAP Fund.

3rd Floor Studios | $10/FREE FOR PRESENTERS

Learn more about McGregor’s Building A Better Fishtrap HERE.

In July of 2016, Paloma McGregor joined fellow CMC Artists-in Residence – Awilda Sterling-Duprey, Awilda Rodríguez Lora, and Oceana James – for research and exchange about the connection between resistance movements in Puerto Rico and St. Croix.

In October, Paloma returned to St. Croix, where she presented a durational performance of Building a Better Fishtrap that led the audience on a walk from her father’s land in Christiansted to the plot in Gallow’s Bay where he used to build traps.

Building a Better Fishtrap/Phase 2 is a solo meditation on the practice of remembering:
What do we take with us? Leave behind? Return to reclaim?
Choreographer and performer Paloma McGregor navigates and transforms a world crafted in collaboration with visual artist Sara Jimenez, installation designer Vassi Spanos and sound designer Everett Saunders. Through this process she encourages us to consider how memory inhabits us and what we can reclaim in the witnessing.

This is Paloma’s culminating AIR performance of the solo iteration of Building A Better Fishtrap, which has been in development over the past two years as a part of her residency at BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange.

Learn more about McGregor’s Building A Better Fishtrap HERE.

Paloma McGregor opens the doors to her solo rehearsal practice as a BAX Artist-in-Residence along with fellow AIRs Will Davis, Kristine Haruna Lee, Marissa Perel, Aurin Squire, and Ni’Ja Whitson. Witness this last peek into the process before her final AIR show in June.
Learn more about McGregor’s Building A Better Fishtrap HERE.

Click here to view the full schedule

Free, Open to the public. Registration is strongly encouraged HERE.

Featuring works by FILMMAKER TAMU FAVORITE, INSTALLATION ARTIST KIMBERLY MAYHORN, and CHOREOGRAPHER PALOMA McGREGOR

Friday & Saturday, December 20-21, 2013 @ 8:00pm
Tickets: $15 General | $8 Low-Income

LOVE|FORTÈ’s Memory Withholdings is an ethnological and experiential study of memory held in the bodies and practices of African descendants in North America. This curation stems from a study of “Acts of ‘Wommanness’; Birthing, Bridging, and Conjuring”- A forum of art, as an expression of what it means to be a woman yesterday, today and tomorrow, and an account and preservation of women’s experiences.

Filmmaker Tamu Favorite, installation artist Kimberly Mayhorn, and choreographer Paloma McGregor will share their work along side each other during the Memory Withholdings curated evening. Through their performances, studies of ‘wommanness’ are accessed and made tangible to audiences through performance; capsules of collective storytelling made manifest through visual, dance, and mixed media offerings.

“Memory Withholdings started before our meeting, as intergenerational artists, and will continue beyond us, hopefully spurring new collaborations and collectives along the way. It is a kind of Prism Project, having many faces i.e. as installation, stage performance, or Kitchen Konversation. As we studied the footage from our evening at BAX last May we realized that this year we’d set our sights on a dramaturge, as we craft the work into Memory Withholdings: a saga of Performance Installations and Performative Acts. Through multimedia exhibition and physical installations with a focus on social change that connects and inspires people with powerful ideas and new ways of thinking that transform our lives and the world, this curated show seeks to fill the gaps and build bridges that advance the human right to equity worldwide.”

Paloma McGregor opens the doors to her solo rehearsal practice as a BAX Artist-in-Residnce along with Will Davis, Kristine Haruna Lee, Marissa Perel, Aurin Squire, and Ni’Ja Whitson.

Featuring the work of: Paloma McGregor/Angela’s Pulse, Audrey Elaine Hailes, Solomon Goodwin/MVP, and Juson Williams

This FREE fall festival of site-specific dance featured the work of four diverse choreographers; two from the Downtown NYC dance community and two Red Hook based artists. Each choreographer is commissioned to create a new work for location in the Erie Basin Park behind IKEA in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

Each choreographer was commissioned to create a new work for location in the Erie Basin Park behind IKEA in Red Hook, Brooklyn. They worked in residence throughout the summer and revealed their works on Sunday, October 4, taking big risks in big spaces while, as McGregor says, “building community and illuminating bold, new stories.” Between shows, guests joined us for a dance party with DJ Royal Isaac.

Funding for this project was provided by Engaging Dance Audiences/Dance USA, which put this local festival on the national stage while providing for interactive, community-based programming in our Red Hook neighborhood. Engaging Dance Audiences is administered by Dance/USA and made possible with generous funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.

Dance on the Greenway 2015 artists performed at several events, including: a dance workshop with seniors, a dinner/dance party with local residents at Red Hook Initiative, and a DJ dance party at the Miccio Community Center, featuring a preview of performances from the festival.

For the past four years, Caribbean-born choreographer Paloma McGregor has been developing Building A Better Fishtrap, a performance project rooted in the vanishing fishing tradition of her 89-year-old father. The project examines what happens when you leave your ancestral home: What do you take with you? Leave behind? Return to reclaim?

Building A Better Fishtrap/Part 1 is the NY evening-length premiere of this work presented with the support of long-time partner, BAAD! The Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance as part of the Boogie Down Dance Festival.

Learn more about McGregor’s Building A Better Fishtrap HERE.

A dance installation by Paloma McGregor/Angela’s Pulse

Free and open to the public. Click here to RSVP.

Performed by Shantelle Jackson, Jessica Lee, Paloma McGregor and Ricarrdo Valentine.
Scenic Design by Paloma McGregor
Costumes by Kym Chambers
Live soundscore by LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs
Sound by Everett Saunders and Paloma McGregor
Text by Ebony Noelle Golden and Paloma McGregor

On the closing day of No Longer Empty’s Curatorial Lab: The Way Out is Through, audiences will witness and contribute to transforming a visual landscape of memory created by Paloma McGregor and Angela’s Pulse collaborators. This installation-based performance is a bridge between the ensemble-based Building a Better Fishtrap/Part 1 and the developing solo iteration (Phase 2).

This installation-based performance is an installment of Building a Better Fishtrap, an iterative performance project rooted in the vanishing fishing tradition of choreographer Paloma McGregor’s father. The project examines what happens when you leave your ancestral home: What do you take with you? Leave behind? Return to reclaim?

The performance will take place continually over a three-hour period, growing and shifting while it activates the LeRoy Neiman space. Audience members are welcome to come and go as they please.

Presented by NLE Curatorial Lab in conjunction with the exhibition The Way Out is Through. Curated by Leticia Gutierrez, Ladi’Sasha Jones, Kirstin Kapustik, Zena Koo, Kenneth Paranada, and Maurizzio Hector Pineda.

Performances by Shani Collins, Love/Forte Productions, Christal Brown, Paloma McGregor and Francine Ott

View the schedule here

A network of South Bronx arts and community organizations create a unique opportunity for presenters and funders to see showcases of new work by Latino and Bronx-based multi-disciplinary dance and performance artists. Opportunities to engage with a diverse range of local and Caribbean-based organizations follow the showcases. View the schedule here.

The 2014 urban interventions were performed throughout Montréal, mainly concentrated along Square Viger. This series provided a means of engaging with spaces and citizens in the urban context.

The Hemispheric Institute’s 9th Encuentro, held at Concordia University in Montréal, Canada, sought to explore the multiple valences of the term MANIFEST! How are performances mobilized and syncretized in civic, community, and cultural contexts to create manifold forms of political expression? How do public, theatrical events produce ‘evidence’ that manifests ideas otherwise invisible, hidden, or unspeakable? What new manifestations, manifestos, festivals, and manifs emerge via our changing visions of political spaces, intellectual arenas, and the everyday street? The 2014 Encuentro invited artists, activists, and scholars to engage with and investigate the aesthetic, social, and choreographic techniques that transform political ideas into collective images, through actions, embodied utterances, and ways of being. Such questions resonated in the host city of Montréal, where la manifestation has a rich and ongoing history.

Re: purpose features the work of Pamela Council, Sara Jimenez, Sondra Perry and Patrice Renee Washington, four New York-based women artists who transform common domestic and cosmetic objects in order to expand the possibilities of self-representation. These artists redefine an object’s form and function to reveal its hidden histories and how our identities inform our perception.

Through work that is referential, critical and humorous, the artists negotiate their identities in relation to consumerism, popular culture, and the daily experience of inhabiting a gendered and racialized body. By choosing materials of personal significance, they claim a variety of cultural legacies and champion the legitimacy of subjective interpretation. Their work troubles aesthetic hierarchies and generates a critical dialogue around the lived realities of women of color in the contemporary art world.

In partnership with the artist-driven initiative Dancing While Black, movement-based artists Rashida Bumbray, Ebony Noelle Golden, Paloma McGregor, Sydnie Mosley, and Gesiye Souza-Okpofabri will perform solos in response to pieces in Re: purpose.

Presented in partnership with MoCADA, Human Rights Project and Urban Bush Women

In 2013, Lillian Ball curated a series of events at WATERWASH ABC Wetland Park in conjunction with Bronx River Alliance including a site-specific performance of Building A Better Fishtrap.